Broadly speaking:
Difference is about the characteristics of a thing - a noun which is stable
Change is about the movement in a verb, something happening or doing, needing energy.
The cause of a disaster is due to the impact of what has been done/happened (verb) that has affected a particular thing (noun) because of its history or special characteristics.
Verb and noun complete a sentence, just as you show time and space in an ordinary graph. (Even when there is just a verb of command, “Stop!” the noun is ‘understood’ ie YOU stop!)
“No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” Heraclitus. Here ‘steps’ seems as if it's the same verb, but the nouns ‘man’ and ‘river’ appear to have changed - not the same river, not the same man. You have to wrestle with it. This unusual insight stems from the sleight of hand confusion between difference and change. Heraclitus loved paradox to stimulate new thoughts.
Our perception that time is flowing may be partly because energy is related to time, not space: it is more a transitory verb than a static and material noun. This is what Heraclitus was exploiting.
When you consider cause-and-effect, it seems inevitable that any cause must have happened before its effect. Indeed post hoc propter hoc warns us against jumping to the conclusion that something which happened before a disaster was its most likely cause. (EDITOR: post hoc propter hoc is short for “post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” a Latin phrase meaning “after this, therefore because of this.” The phrase expresses the logical fallacy of assuming that one thing caused another merely because the first thing preceded the other.)
